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How the brain performs credit assignment is a fundamental unsolved problem in neuroscience. Many `biologically plausible' algorithms have been proposed, which compute gradients that approximate those computed by backpropagation (BP), and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Beren Millidge , Yuhang Song , Tommaso Salvatori , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Rafal Bogacz

Training an energy-based model (EBM) with maximum likelihood is challenging due to the intractable normalisation constant. Traditional methods rely on expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to estimate the gradient of logartihm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Hugo Senetaire , Paul Jeha , Pierre-Alexandre Mattei , Jes Frellsen

This work proposes a method for using any generator network as the foundation of an Energy-Based Model (EBM). Our formulation posits that observed images are the sum of unobserved latent variables passed through the generator network and a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Mitch Hill , Erik Nijkamp , Jonathan Mitchell , Bo Pang , Song-Chun Zhu

We show that the bias of the approximate maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) objective of a persistent chain energy-based model (EBM) is precisely equal to the thermodynamic excess work of an overdamped Langevin dynamical system. We then…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-10-06 Jeff Hnybida , Simon Verret

We consider average-energy games, where the goal is to minimize the long-run average of the accumulated energy. While several results have been obtained on these games recently, decidability of average-energy games with a lower-bound…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Patricia Bouyer , Piotr Hofman , Nicolas Markey , Mickael Randour , Martin Zimmermann

Energy-based models (EBMs) are a flexible class of deep generative models and are well-suited to capture complex dependencies in multimodal data. However, learning multimodal EBM by maximum likelihood requires Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Jiali Cui , Zhiqiang Lao , Heather Yu

Learning energy-based models (EBMs) is known to be difficult especially on discrete data where gradient-based learning strategies cannot be applied directly. Although ratio matching is a sound method to learn discrete EBMs, it suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Meng Liu , Haoran Liu , Shuiwang Ji

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space of the generator model. Learning such prior model typically requires running costly Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Instead, we propose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zhisheng Xiao , Tian Han

We propose Energy-based generator matching (EGM), a modality-agnostic approach to train generative models from energy functions in the absence of data. Extending the recently proposed generator matching, EGM enables training of arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Dongyeop Woo , Minsu Kim , Minkyu Kim , Kiyoung Seong , Sungsoo Ahn

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is routinely used for the maximum likelihood estimation in the latent class analysis. However, the EM algorithm comes with no guarantees of reaching the global optimum. We study the geometry of…

In this paper, we propose to equip Generative Adversarial Networks with the ability to produce direct energy estimates for samples.Specifically, we propose a flexible adversarial training framework, and prove this framework not only ensures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-27 Zihang Dai , Amjad Almahairi , Philip Bachman , Eduard Hovy , Aaron Courville

While energy-based models (EBMs) exhibit a number of desirable properties, training and sampling on high-dimensional datasets remains challenging. Inspired by recent progress on diffusion probabilistic models, we present a diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Ruiqi Gao , Yang Song , Ben Poole , Ying Nian Wu , Diederik P. Kingma

We introduce a data-driven framework for approximating the convex set of $N$-representable two-electron reduced density matrices (2-RDMs). Traditional approaches characterize this set through linear matrix inequalities that define its…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2026-03-09 Luis H. Delgado-Granados , David A. Mazziotti

We propose a general theorem providing upper bounds for the risk of an empirical risk minimizer (ERM).We essentially focus on the binary classification framework. We extend Tsybakov's analysis of the risk of an ERM under margin type…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-08-14 Pascal Massart , Élodie Nédélec

We present a variational free-energy formulation for distributionally robust decision-making with ambiguity in the generative model. The formulation, related to a broad range of learning and control frameworks, yields a minimax optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Arash Shafiei , Caio César Graciani Rodrigues , Giovanni Russo

Training normalizing flow generative models can be challenging due to the need to calculate computationally expensive determinants of Jacobians. This paper studies the likelihood-free training of flows and proposes the energy objective, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Phillip Si , Zeyi Chen , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Yair Schiff , Volodymyr Kuleshov

As opposed to standard empirical risk minimization (ERM), distributionally robust optimization aims to minimize the worst-case risk over a larger ambiguity set containing the original empirical distribution of the training data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Jaeho Lee , Maxim Raginsky

In this paper, we propose conjugate energy-based models (CEBMs), a new class of energy-based models that define a joint density over data and latent variables. The joint density of a CEBM decomposes into an intractable distribution over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Hao Wu , Babak Esmaeili , Michael Wick , Jean-Baptiste Tristan , Jan-Willem van de Meent

Generative models form the backbone of modern machine learning, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in text, vision, and multimodal applications. While Maximum Likelihood Estimation has traditionally served as the dominant training…

Energy-based models (EBMs) provide a powerful and flexible way of learning a joint probability distribution over data by constructing an energy surface. This energy surface enables insight extraction and conditional sampling. We apply EBMs…

Plasma Physics · Physics 2026-05-12 Phil Travis , Troy Carter